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Ellie Roy joins the Anania Media team!

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Expanding Our Team with New Talent

At Anania Media, we’re always keeping an eye out for new talent in the digital advertising space around Maine and New England. Sometimes that means being ready and open to expanding our own internal team. When you’re a small business like us, the latter can be a little daunting. But when you find a great fit for both company culture and advancement in the field, new team members can make all the difference.

Ellie Roy, Digital Marketing Specialist

In October 2020, we were happy to welcome our newest employee, Ellie Roy! Ellie is a recent graduate of Boston University, where she finished her degree in three years with a major in English and a minor in Cinema & Media Studies. She has published two short fiction stories in literary magazines and is currently working on her first novel. At Anania Media, she focuses on copywriting and social media project management, and she hopes to grow into a senior editorial role as the company continues to advance.

Ellie is humbled to have been given this opportunity amid all the challenges that 2020 has brought, and has hit the ground running with all our clients and their many projects. She runs her own author website, where you’ll find all her work, and you can also find her on Twitter and Instagram. Welcome to the team, Ellie!

Hello, we’re here. We’re good, an update from Anania Media.

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This has been a tough time for small businesses, and marketing agencies are not immune. We feel fortunate in a lot of ways, as we are in a better position than similar agencies and for right now, we’re good. This has a lot to do with how we’ve structured our agency and our incredible clients supporting us. We wanted to take this opportunity to fill you in on a couple of things.

We’re doing everything we can to help our clients who are struggling during this time. We’ve seen this with clients in the travel and hospitality industries. It’s been rewarding to see our efforts having success in promoting alternatives to their main revenue streams by leveraging social media advertising. If you know anyone struggling in these industries, let us know. We can be a resource by offering guidance and advice.

Our team is being given the option to work remotely. As an agency that embraces technology, we’ve had this capability for a while and this will not slow us down. We can also be a resource for individuals who may be new to this concept.

Although we are better shape than what we’re seeing with similar agencies, some key projects and accounts have been paused. If you are in a position to go forward with a marketing project that’s been on the back-burner let us know, we’re ready to take it on.

Lastly, I will let you know that a new Anania Media will be emerging from the crisis, this has been in the making for a while. We’re redoing our website, improving our process and ready to take our agency to the next level. Through our efforts and support, we will help our clients, friends and families through these uncertain times.

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions or concerns.

Eight Steps For Your 2020 Marketing Strategy

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Is Your Marketing Strategy Updated for 2020?

Each year, it is important to take time to do an overall assessment of your company or organization’s marketing strategy. Doing so can help you identify where you want to focus your efforts and how you need to shift your marketing plans to keep up with an ever-changing media and technological landscape. At Anania Media, we’ve distilled the steps for assessing and creating an annual marketing plan down to eight basic steps. They are:

  • Define your target audience
  • Determine your short-term and long-term goals
  • Conduct an audit of your current marketing efforts
  • Conduct a competitor analysis
  • Identify and assess aspirational brands
  • Determine a marketing and advertising budget
  • Detail your marketing tactics
  • Determine a plan for evaluating the results of your marketing methods

These steps are a basic guide to planning out your marketing strategy, providing you with a path that ensures you take into account all aspects of an effective strategy.

Define Your Target Audience

The first step in developing your marketing strategy should be to define who you are trying to sell to. Whether you’re selling goods or offering a service, there is an audience out there that is most likely to do business with you. To determine your target audience, start by asking yourself simple questions – who will be walking into my store in 2020? Who is picking up the phone to call me to make an appointment, or emailing me for more information about the services I provide? One of the tactics we like to use at Anania Media is to cut down your audience to job titles. What are the job titles of the people you want to gear your marketing towards? Lawyers? Accountants? Chefs? Stay-at-home moms? Teachers? All of the above? Using job titles as a way to define your audience is a way to get you thinking about demographics, though in a more general sense. For a more detailed dive into your audience, you absolutely should look into demographics – income levels of your clients/customers, towns of residence, marital status, gender, etc. All of this information comes in useful in crafting marketing materials, as well as in determining where to spend your advertising dollars.

Determine Your Short-term and Long-term Goals

When you’re developing a marketing strategy, you don’t want to just consider the what. You also need to consider the why. Why are you creating a marketing strategy and what will it help you accomplish? Determine your goals in three different categories – marketing, business development, and overall business. Marketing and business development are more likely to have short-term goals that are helping you achieve your long-term overall goals for your business.

Conduct an Audit Of Your Current Marketing Efforts

Every business has some form of marketing, even if they don’t have a dedicated marketing department. Before you begin crafting a new marketing plan for 2020, look at what you are currently doing. This might just be an assessment of your website and brand logo, or it might be a sweeping audit of dollars spent on tv advertising, digital ads and print materials. Take each piece of your current marketing efforts and evaluate what it is currently accomplishing (or not accomplishing) for you. How does your brand exist in your space? What are the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and your current strategy? How can you incorporate the strengths in 2020? Where can you improve your marketing materials and efforts throughout the year? Ask yourself these questions, and write down the answers so you have information and ideas to turn to while you create a new marketing plan.

Conduct a Competitor Analysis

Because your company doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is also crucial to conduct an analysis of your competitors’ marketing efforts and branded materials. Look at the strengths and weaknesses of competitors within your region and within your industry, and identify areas where you can improve your own brand based on their successes. You want to assess your competitors’ marketing efforts from the perspective of how you can rise above and stand out in your space. Analyze your competitors, then use your 2020 marketing strategy to help you stand apart from them.

Identify and Assess Aspirational Brands

Identifying and assessing aspirational brands is a separate endeavor from analyzing competitors, as aspirational brands don’t even necessarily have to be in your industry. We recommend looking at two or three different brands, including one regional brand and one or two national brands. Aspirational brands can be brands that have printed materials, a digital presence, or an entire mission or presence that you admire. Looking at what your aspirational brands are doing correctly can help strengthen your own marketing efforts as you strive to achieve the kind of impressive presence that these brands have.

Determine a Marketing & Advertising Budget

As you begin to move towards designing and implementing your 2020 marketing plan, you need to know your budget. To have a successful implementation of your marketing plan, your budget needs to be more detailed than just having a total figure that you are able to spend on marketing throughout the year. Our advice is to create a spreadsheet in which you allocate available funds under different categories such as “Facebook ads,” “Printed materials,” “Google ads,” and so forth. To make this spreadsheet easily understandable for people who don’t ‘speak marketing,’ we also recommend adding descriptors. For example, under Facebook ads you could note that this money will be spent to reach X demographic via Facebook ads because they aren’t a demographic that is reachable by radio ads.

Detail Your Marketing Tactics

In addition to detailing your marketing budget, you should also detail individual aspects of your marketing strategy. Different people and different companies may find varying levels of detail work for them – one company may want to go as far as creating a monthly editorial calendar in advance, while another may find that simply having a bulleted list that includes ‘monthly blog’ as an element of their marketing strategy is sufficient. Every tactic included in your 2020 marketing plan should have an identifiable or trackable return on investment or ROI.

Determine a Plan For Evaluating the Results of Your Marketing Efforts

The final step we advise you take as you craft your 2020 marketing plan is to determine how you will be evaluating the effectiveness of your plan as you implement it. Decide which metrics you’ll be assessing, which tools you will be using to assess them, as well as how often you will be looking at the results. Month over month and year over date are two effective comparisons to look at. Keeping on top of your data and adjusting your strategies is key to a successful marketing plan implementation. It can also be fun to look at the data and see how much progress you have made!

Watch Our Full Discussion About the Eight Steps for Your 2020 Marketing Strategy

As you plan and implement your 2020 marketing strategy, we wish you the best of success. If you’d like to hear our full discussion on our eight steps for your 2020 marketing strategy, you can view the video podcast on our YouTube page. We regularly add new content with insights into marketing, digital media and business development, so be sure to follow the Anania Media YouTube Channel to stay up-to-date with our new material.

The Importance of Branding

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What is Branding?

A bright red can. A white wave underlining large cursive letters that wrap around that bright red can. That design translates to their bottles, their billboards, their trucks and their apparel. We hardly need to tell you what company we’re talking about. And why is that? Because of branding. Well, not simply branding, but because of effective branding. So what is effective branding?

A brand is a comprehensive package that communicates your company’s message to potential customers. A logo is a key piece of branding, but it is not the entirety. To pick a famous brand, let’s look at Nike. The letters in the Nike logo are uniquely Nike’s, but the Swoosh implies action and the “Just Do It” tag communicates the company’s ethos. The three belong together and together they tell a potential customer what kind of message they are buying into.

Anatomy of a brand

The logo

We just covered that a brand is more than a logo, but typically, a logo is a good place to start when considering your brand. Think of some words that define your company, or are at least aspirational. We can use those words—say, for example, speed, professionalism and compassion—to choose the visual elements that go into your logo. What typeface, the font, if you will, should be chosen is a good first step and typography can communicate a lot about your message right off the bat. To illustrate this point, which law firm* would you choose from the two options below?

Another choice that goes into a logo is an icon. An icon can be a typographic (the McDonald’s arches) or an image (the Twitter bird). There may be several reasons that a client might choose an icon, but the best reason is that the icon helps communicate your message to your audience.

Your logo is going to be the DNA of your brand so, make sure that there isn’t anything in that is going to confuse its viewers. We take these considerations into every logo that we create and every logo that we work with, forming the very best impression for your company to potential customers.

The website

So, you have your product—a good or service—and you have your logo that calls out to people who you are. The next part of the brand is where that logo and those products live. For some products it makes sense to have an actual brick-and-mortar location like a store or warehouse for people to go and see, while others will be providing their products and services digitally, or at least through the web. Whether or not you have a physical location, every company or business should have a website as well. For this blog, we will skip the physical store and talk about the website, but many of the branding elements that go into a good website are good practices in the physical world as well.

First, your website should be—99% of the time—organized, easy to navigate and able to be responsive to the type of screen that a user is viewing it on. Second, from a visual standpoint, you’ll want to see some of the DNA that we mentioned before from your logo spread throughout your site. Consistent colors, typographic styles, messaging and images will create cohesion and will create a sense of professionalism in the minds of your users. And lastly, you’ll want to make sure that it is easy for a user to access/buy/use your good or service. Both in a real store or e-commerce, any confusion or friction around a product will reduce the likelihood that your audience will engage with it. Clear pricing, attractive calls-to-action, clear navigation, and trustworthy checkouts are staples of physical and virtual places of business. At Anania Media, these best practices are baked into the sites that we create to expand your logo and ideas into a fully cohesive brand.

The marketing

The visuals—like marketing materials—are the delivery system for your message. They are how you get your products or services in front of new and, hopefully returning, customers. Google and print ads, commercials, social media posts, trade show booths and more are what bring your brand—that combination of product, messaging, logo, and website/storefront—to your audience. You know that you’ve got to be in front of their eyes to get their attention, so that means letting them find you where they are. We partner with our clients to understand their needs and combine their industry knowledge with our marketing expertise to get your brand out there.

What’s next?

Still, you might ask, “Isn’t a brand for a bigger type of company than mine? What will branding do for my company that just a logo won’t do? Isn’t that what marketing is for?” That’s a great question and it will be the focus of part two of this series.

*Yes, Nelson & Murdock is from Marvel’s Daredevil comics. Enjoy.